The Beginning of the Persian Wars
The most famous series of wars in ancient Greek history—the so-called Persian
Wars which took place in the 490s and in 480-479—broke out when the Persian
king decided to punish Greek states he regarded as rebellious subjects. The trouble
started with a revolt in
Ionia1, on the west coast of Anatolia (modern Turkey), where the Greek city-states
had earlier come under Persian control.
Croesus of Lydia and the Ionian Greeks
The
Ionian Greeks2 originally lost their independence not to the Persians but when they were
overpowered by Croesus3 (*c. 560-546), king of
Lydia4. The
Lydians5 were a non-Greek people whose land bordered on Ionia on the east. Since
Croesus gained confidence from this conquest and was emboldened by his vast wealth, he
resolved to attack the Persian kingdom, whose territory lay to the east of Lydia.
Persia was just now becoming powerful and thus a potential threat to Lydia. Croesus
sent an emissary to request advice from the
oracle of the god Apollo at
Delphi6 in
central Greece on the advisability of the Lydian army attacking Persia. The
oracle responded,7 “If Croesus crosses into Persian territory, he will destroy a great
kingdom.” When
Croesus attacked the Persians in 546 B.C., his forces
were crushed by Cyrus8, the Persian king. Lydia, along with Ionia, fell to the Persians. Later,
Cyrus allowed Croesus, now his prisoner being treated with respect in honor of
his former royal status, to complain to the Delphic oracle9 that its advice had been wrong and that the god had not repaid the favor that
Croesus had earlier shown him by sending splendid gifts to his Delphic sanctuary. The
oracle pointedly replied to the complaint by answering that, if Croesus had been wise,
he would have asked a second question:
whose kingdom was he going to destroy
with his expedition, Cyrus' or his own?10
Revolt in Ionia
As overlords of
Ionia11, the Persian kings installed and supported tyrants in its city-states. By 499
B.C. the Ionians were tired of Persian-backed tyranny and suffered from internal
unrest. They rebelled, sending representatives to mainland Greece to ask for help in
their revolt against Persia. The Spartan king Cleomenes
declined to help12 after he saw the map the Ionian representative had brought and learned that an
attack on the Persian capital would entail a three months' march inland from Ionia.
He, like the other Spartans, had no idea of the geography of the Near East. The men of
the Athenian assembly responded differently to the Ionian plea.
They voted to
join the city-state of Eretria on the
neighboring island Euboea and send military
aid to the Ionians13. The combined
Athenian-Eretrian force actually got as far as Sardis14, Croesus' old capital, now the headquarters of a Persian provincial governor.
After burning Sardis to the ground, however, the
Athenians and Eretrians
returned home15 when a Persian counterattack caused the Ionian allies to lose their
coordination. Subsequent campaigns by the
Persian king's commanders crushed the
Ionian rebels16 by 494 B.C.
Persian Vengeance against Athens
King Darius was doubly furious when he learned that the Athenians had aided the
Ionian revolt: not only had they dared attack his kingdom, they had done so after
earlier
having offered him earth and water17, thereby signifying—in the king's eyes—their submission to
him in order to secure an alliance. Insignificant though Athens was in his opinion
because its resources were so puny compared to those of his kingdom, Darius vowed to
exact vengeance from Athens as punishment for its disloyalty to him. The Greeks later
claimed that, to keep himself from forgetting his vow in the press of all his other
concerns, Darius ordered one of his slaves to say to him three times at every meal,
“Sire, remember the Athenians.” 18 In 490 B.C.
Darius dispatched a flotilla of ships19 carrying troops to attack the disloyal Greeks.
After burning Eretria20, the
city-state on the island of Euboea whose troops had joined those of Athens in the
attack on Sardis,
the Persian expedition landed on the northeastern coast of
Attica near a village called Marathon21. The
Persians had brought with them the
elderly Hippias22, the son of the former tyrant of Athens named Pisistratus. Hippias had himself
been tyrant of Athens until he was forced into exile in 510 B.C. by an Athenian
democratic uprising backed by Spartan military force. The Persians expected to
reinstall Hippias as tyrant of Athens under their sway, in similar fashion to the
tyrannies they had once installed in Ionian city-states. Since the Persian troops at
Marathon outnumbered the citizen militia of Athenian
hoplites23 (heavily armored infantry men
armed with spears and swords, the principal component of Greek land armies), the
Athenians asked the Spartans and other Greek city-states for military help.
The
Athenian courier dispatched to Sparta24 became famous because he ran the hundred and forty miles from Athens to Sparta
in less than two days. By the time the battle of Marathon took place, however, the
only allied troops to arrive were a
contingent from the small, nearby city-state
of Plataea25.
The Battle of Marathon
Everyone expected the Persians to win at
Marathon26.
The Athenian and Plataean soldiers, who had never seen Persians
before27, grew afraid just gazing at their unfamiliar and (to Greek eyes)
frighteningly outlandish outfits. Nevertheless, the Athenian generals—the
board of ten men elected each year as the civil and military leaders of
Athens—never let their men lose heart. Led by the aristocrat
Miltiades28 (c. 550-489 B.C.) and carefully planning their tactics to minimize the time
their soldiers would be exposed to the fire of Persian archers,
the generals
sent their hoplites across the plain of Marathon at a dead run29 against the Persian line. The Greeks in their
metal armor30 clanked across the open space between the two armies under a hail of
Persian arrows31 fired like an artillery barrage. Once engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the
Persians, the Greek hoplites benefited from their superior, more protective armor and
longer weapons, which allowed them to strike their enemies while they themselves were
still out of reach. After a furious struggle, the
Greek infantry men drove the
Persians back into a swamp32, where the invaders who failed to escape to their ships could be picked off
safely at the attackers' leisure.
Announcing the Victory
At the end of the battle of Marathon an Athenian messenger ran the twenty-six miles
from the plain of Marathon to the city of Athens to report the victory and warn the
people in the city to guard against
a naval attack by the Persian fleet, which
was sailing around the peninsula of Attica33 (the territory of Athens as a city-state) to see if the
city could be taken by an approach from the coast to its west.
When the
Persians ended up sailing home without taking Athens34, the Athenians rejoiced in disbelief. The Persians, whom they had feared as
invincible, had retreated. For decades afterwards, the greatest honor an Athenian
man could claim was to say he had been a “
Marathon
fighter35.” The run
of the messenger who reported the victory is commemorated in today's marathon races,
whose name and distance are derived from this run in 490 B.C.
Aftereffects of the Battle of Marathon
The symbolic importance of the
battle of Marathon36 in 490 B.C. far outweighed its military significance.
The defeat of his
punitive expedition enraged Darius37 because it insulted his
prestige, not because it represented any threat to the security of his kingdom. The
Athenian men who comprised the city-state's army, on the other hand, had dramatically
demonstrated their commitment to preserving their freedom by refusing to capitulate to
an enemy whose reputation for power and wealth had made a disastrous Athenian defeat
appear certain. The unexpected victory at Marathon gave an unparalleled boost to
Athenian self-confidence, and the city-state's soldiers and leaders thereafter always
boasted that they had stood fast before the feared barbarians even though
the
Spartans had not arrived in time to help them.38
